John Pearson - Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

How the Kray Twins Made
Themselves Immortal

John Pearson

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Epub ISBN 9781409099963

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Published by Century in 2010

Copyright John Pearson 2010

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For Mark Booth

Also by John Pearson

Non-fiction

Bluebird and the Dead Lake

The Persuasion Industry (with Graham Turner)

The Life of Ian Fleming

Arena: The Story of the Colosseum

The Profession of Violence

Edward the Rake

Barbara Cartland: The Crusader in Pink

Facades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell

Stags and Serpents: The Cavendish Dukes of Devonshire

The Ultimate Family: The Making of the House of Windsor

Citadel of the Heart: Winston and the Churchill Dynasty

Painfully Rich: J. Paul Getty and His Heirs

Blood Royal: The Story of the Spencers and the Royals

The Cult of Violence

One of the Family: The Englishman and the Mafia

The Gamblers: Aspinall, Goldsmsith and the Murder of Lord Lucan

Fiction

Gone to Timbuctoo

The Life of James Bond

The Kindness of Dr Avicenna

The Authorised Life of Biggles

The Bellamy Saga

Praise for The Profession of Violence by John Pearson

The most famous biography of criminal life to have been published in Britain it has become something of a cult among the young.

Time Out

The person who best understood what made the Kray industry tick and the Kray fascination blossom remains John Pearson whose book The Profession of Violence summed the two men up.

Deborah Orr, the Independent

All credit to Mr Pearson for a brave and disturbing book.

Daily Express

The biography is brave and well-written an exciting read. The Times

Mr Pearson has produced a scrupulous dossier of the Krays weird career.

Daily Telegraph

The book is extremely well-written and is fitting deadpan.

New Statesman

From an early age Ron and I had taken it for granted that whatever path we took wed end up being famous

I SUPPOSE FEW THINGS in life are more disturbing for a writer than the awareness of unfinished business, and having to accept that something you wrote about many years ago is unresolved worse still, when you stumble on the truth that has eluded you for so long and it starts to haunt you. Which is what has recently been happening to me over the whole strange story of the Krays.

Back in 1967 when I first met them in the house which is now the stately home of former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, I genuinely lacked the faintest notion of what I was in for, which was just as well. In some ways I was fortunate. Its not every day that a pair of celebrated murderers invite a biographer to share their reminiscences, meet their family and friends, and write the story of their lives. Later I learned that, before asking me, their first choice had been Truman Capote who had declined which showed that Truman wasnt quite as silly as he seemed.

Time moved on. By the time my book was finished, nearly four years later, the Twins had been sent to prison for the rest of their natural lives, and I had spent six months of mine sitting through their remand hearing at the Old Street Magistrates Court, followed by their trial at the Old Bailey. By then I probably knew more about them than they knew themselves, and when my book was published in 1972 under the title The Profession of Violence they hated it though later, when they saw what it was inadvertently doing for their prestige in jail, they changed their minds

Apart from the fact that, for reasons which I will explain later in this book, the project had all but bankrupted me, I was rather pleased with it. It has been in print ever since, and Im told that it kicked-started a genre of so-called true crime books, as well as a cottage industry of memoirs by almost anyone who believes that he can write and can claim the faintest contact with the Twins. At the last count there were over thirty of them. So when I heard that, after the Bible, The Profession had become the most widely read book in HM Prisons, and Time Out magazine was hailing it as the most famous biography of criminal life to have been published in Britain, I felt Id said all that needed to be said about the Krays, and that was that.

I had not reckoned with the Twins. Throughout their time in captivity Id kept in touch with them, and by the time of their deaths Ron in 1995, Reg six years later and the grandiose East End funerals that followed, something very odd indeed had happened. It seemed that, having been celebrity criminals for years, they had finally achieved something more. There had been a film about them. Every London taxi driver over fifty seemed to have some story to tell about them, and their former bitter gangland enemy Mad Frankie Fraser was currently conducting gobsmacked tourists round The Blind Beggar, the unlovely East End hostelry where Ron had gunned down his fellow villain, George Cornell. David Baileys photographs had, as the phrase goes, iconised them, and when sociologists started writing learned papers about them it was clear that they had assumed their place in the social history of the Sixties. They were also something of a national obsession, and just as James Bond epitomises everything we take for granted in a secret agent and Sherlock Holmes is our ultimate detective, so the one word Kray is embedded in our collective memory as accepted shorthand for the quintessential British gangster.

But who really were these two strange criminals whom I thought I knew so well? Why and how, out of all the variegated villains who have filled our newspapers and television screens during the last half-century, did it have to be the Krays, and they alone, who took their place beside Jack the Ripper as iconic criminals of enduring fascination?